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museums, libraries, and archivesSun, 21 Feb 2010 12:49:42 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.1Crème de Menthe and Armor: The Josiah Tell Interviewhttp://suggesteddonation.com/lets-get-critical/americas-answer-to-theodore-roosevelt-interviews-himself-about-the-arms-and-armor-gallery-at-the-met
http://suggesteddonation.com/lets-get-critical/americas-answer-to-theodore-roosevelt-interviews-himself-about-the-arms-and-armor-gallery-at-the-met#commentsMon, 09 Nov 2009 06:11:56 +0000http://suggesteddonation.com/?p=1679the full interview inside, but leave your inhibitions at the door. Because if you bring them inside they will die of fright.
]]>I first met Josiah Tell in the Spring of 1999, when he tapped me to ghost write his autobiography Josiah Tells All!: Notes from America’s Answer to Theodore Roosevelt. His erratic behavior—and his frequent absences due to the many arraignments he was required to attend over the years—made progress slow. The book was finally published on Tell’s GeoCities site last month, three days before Yahoo shut down the web hosting service permanently. Tell, who has claimed that backing up data is “for girls,” was left with nothing.

Tell has been known as the bad boy of the art historical world since 1985, when he provoked a fist fight at Pomona College’s annual Renaissance Art Symposium. (He repeatedly interrupted the keynote speaker by shouting from his seat in the audience that Leonardo da Vinci “was a big old Scientologist,” a claim that he stands by.) Since then, he’s traveled from museum to museum, shoplifting from gift stores and subsisting mostly on the free cru d’été served at exhibition openings.

In short, Josiah Tell is an abrasive outcast who only stays relevant by occasionally producing groundbreaking research. ArtForum calls his mode of scholarship the Stopped Clock method: unlike his peers, Tell doesn’t mind having his theories proved completely wrong. And because he’s never shy about sharing his libelous and paranoid theories, the law of averages states that eventually, a few of them will be correct—and fewer still, brilliant.

When he arrived at the Swedish Consulate General in New York, (where he’d demanded we hold this interview, since “The Swedes have never—and I do mean never—successfully prosecuted a submarine robbery”) Tell reeked of gasoline. “It’s Friday,” he shrugged, by way of explanation (It was a Tuesday). Tell grabbed the elbow of a passer-by and ordered “a piping-hot mug of crème de menthe.” Miraculously, the man, who I later learned was a senior diplomat, returned a few short minutes later with a steaming cup of liqueur, and nervously apologized for the wait. Call it the Tell Effect.

Tell wanted to speak about his recent visit to the Arms and Armor Court at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but, being intensely suspicious of journalists, he refused to answer anything I asked. Instead, he conducted the entire interview himself, posing his own questions and pausing thoughtfully before responding.

Q: Are Arms awesome?

A: They are.

Q: How about Armor?

A: You bet!

Q: I was told you were a liberal elitist, and a socialist besides. Shouldn’t you hate guns?

A: Well, look: you can’t spell “Red State” without “Red.” So there’s something to think about. Plus, these weapons are all from Olden Times, before we had nations to protect us from Visigoths and bears and whatnot. Not to mention the constant threat of defenestration, which my research suggests killed more Europeans in the Premodern period than any other cause except witchcraft. So, sure, if I were living in Olden Times, you can bet I would have had as many muskets as I could fit in my castle. I would have worn a suit of armor, codpiece and all, in my sleep. Would have been crazy not to.

Q: That’s a really good point.

A: Thank you.

Q: Speaking of codpieces, if Prince were alive back in Arms and Armor days, what kind of codpiece would he wear?

A: You wouldn’t believe how often I get asked that question. He’d wear this one:

Q: Rad!

A: I know, right?

Q: It assumes the wearer has an erection at all times!

A: Yeah, it’s pretty hilarious. I had to be escorted from the gallery the first time I went because I was laughing so hard.

Q: So what was your favorite piece there?

A: Definitely the seven-foot-tall suit of German fluted armor (below left). Look at it—the center suit’s a full head taller than the other two! Think how big the guy who wore that must have been. And this was back when everyone else was all atrophied and hunchbacked from gout and a diet of hardtack and dirt, so this two-metre Teuton would have been huge.

Q: Well, the Days of Yore were some rough times, but I’m pretty sure people weren’t literally eating dirt.

A: Lots of people assume that. I actually was joking when I first said it, but apparently it’s a real thing called geophagy.

Q: Weird.

A: Totally weird! Eating dirt! But so anyway, you can imagine how terrifying this brute must have seemed in 1500, what with everyone else so malnourished and withered from eating rocks. If this ogre had started lumbering towards you in battle—

Q: Jesus Christ, I’d have pissed myself!

A: Precisely, you’d have pissed yourself. And suit of armor, remember, is impermeable, so it’s not like it would eventually have evaporated like that time you wet yourself after drinking a pint of ethanol that you stole from the the Rutgers Chem lab that caused you to pass out in a rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike, and when you woke up your cargo shorts smelled like frat bathroom but at least they were dry.

Q: I beg your pardon—I’m sure I don’t know what you’re referring to. And it was a tollbooth.

A: Yes, that’s right. You know, I haven’t been able to listen to Prairie Home Companion since that night. Who would have guessed that Garrison Keeler was such an adept cage fighter?

Q: He literally bent that guy’s arm backwards! Like with the elbow all going the wrong way! That’s a nice segue, actually, let’s move on to Arms. Were any of the handguns displayed in such a way that they appeared to be floating?

A: Yes. This revolver, manufactured by Samuel Colt, was displayed in exactly that manner:

Q: Super cool! That’s some nice curatorial work.

A: It is.

Q: Well, this has been a wonderful. Thanks for your time.

A: The pleasure was mine.

At this point, Tell lurched out of his seat and asked to use the phone at the receptionist’s desk. He dialed 411, and after politely requesting the operator’s name and social security number, made his query. “New York City, The Internet. Yes. I need the number for The Internet. You can just put me through directly (pause). It’s some kind of a computer thing, I’m pretty sure it’s like Sega. Have you played Sega? (pause) Well look, I need Paypal to wire some money over to the Swedish embassy. I’ve just now realized I’m short on cash and unable to pay my bar tab, so I need money moved from my Party Poker account in Mauritius to the— (pause) Hello?” Tell’s face fell, and he slowly returned the receiver to the desk attendant. “My deepest regrets, Your Grace. Evidently my bank refuses to do business with Scandinavians. On account of the War—you understand.”

And with that, Josiah Tell bowed deeply from the waist and sprinted out the door, into the night.

Sergio Holl is an arts writer based in New York City.

]]>http://suggesteddonation.com/lets-get-critical/americas-answer-to-theodore-roosevelt-interviews-himself-about-the-arms-and-armor-gallery-at-the-met/feed0My Roommate’s Camera is a Racisthttp://suggesteddonation.com/interspective/my-roommates-camera-is-a-racist
http://suggesteddonation.com/interspective/my-roommates-camera-is-a-racist#commentsSun, 20 Sep 2009 22:45:14 +0000http://suggesteddonation.com/?p=1638more inside.
]]>My housemate’s point-and-shoot digital camera, which I borrow to take photos for this blog, has a default setting called face detect. Face detect frames your subjects’ heads in little white boxes that show up in the the camera’s LCD viewfinder, presumably to help you take technically excellent pictures of Brock and Jimbo and Boner and the rest of the bros pounding mad shots of Jäger (Canon describes the setting as a “technology that detects up to nine faces in a frame and automatically optimizes the focus and exposure for great people shots.”)

But when I was taking pictures of the Met’s Beneson gallery today, I noticed that face detect doesn’t work on African art. I took ten pictures of figurative statues and masks, and in only one of them did the unnervingly Orwellian feature kick in. So 90 percent of these portraits of men and women, executed in stone and wood and metal by different artists in different countries, weren’t face-y enough for the camera to recognize them as faces.

I wouldn’t have thought twice about the failure of this unnecessary “feature”, except that on the way out of the Museum, I took a few pictures of some 18th century Italian marble and wood statues. And wouldn’t you know it? The camera recognized the European faces as faces about 3/4 of the time. That creepy little box perfectly framed the head of St. Bartholomew, and worse, in a statue of Perseus holding the disembodied head of Medusa, it even picked up on old hair-snakes. That’s right: this technology recognizes grimacing decapitated mythological monsters, but not idealized portraits of black Africans.

In fairness, this wasn’t a scientific experiment, and it’s possible that low light, or the glare off of the glass display cases, threw the camera for a loop. And I doubt it’d recognize the faces in a Picasso or de Kooning. It’s obviously looking for live human faces, and most of the art in the Beneson Gallery is abstracted–bodies are elongated, features broadened, etc. So is the PowerShot really a bigot? Probably not (although I’m still weirded out by that one time it got really drunk and started talking about how Tom Tancredo’s stance on immigration was “right on”).

But the face detect thing does show one of the biggest stumbling blocks that non-Africans have with understanding African art. Euros and Americans put this premium on art that looks like “the real world.” People go nuts for Vermeer because the way he uses light and color and perspective make his paintings look like photographs. But–sweeping, semi-informed generalizations to follow–African art has never really been about art-for-art’s sake, it’s meant to be used. These masks and staffs and pipes and statues only make sense in context–if you see a video of Yoruba dancers wearing headdresses, you can ‘get’ African art much more easily than you can if you just see isolated objects in hermetically sealed glass cases. Obviously, a devotional statue of the Virgin Mary was meant to be “used”, too, but since most Americans are more familiar with Christianity than with the Dogon religion, Americans’ knee-jerk reaction is to prefer a European statue of the Madonna over an African sculpture of a fertility goddess.

The Beneson Gallery does have lots of helpful text explaining the objects’ intended use, and that’s something. But unfortunately, the work isn’t really given a chance to breathe the way it wants to. Like most of the stuff in the Met, it’s decontextualized, but for those of us who aren’t already familiar with African art, these statues are at best less interesting, and at worst, less beautiful or compelling than their European counterparts. It’s a shame. Part of the problem is organizational–the Art of Africa, Oceania, and Central and South America are all part of the same department (AAOA), while American Art gets its own goddamn wing of the Museum. I’m not arguing that each country should get should get as much floorspace as American art, but it would be nice if there were more than a couple modest galleries representing the entire continent of Africa.

In a speech given before the Museum opened in 1869, the Met’s first president said that it’s not enough to have a world-class collection–you need to make the material accessible to visitors. So come on, Museum. Help us understand. Give African art its due–give us more more and better-lit galleries of African Art, more exhibitions of contemporary African artists, and more interactive displays showing the work in context.

And while we love-love the renovated Greek and Roman wing, next time you’ve got $900 million to spare, how about throwing a little of it in the direction of the Beneson Gallery for African art?

]]>http://suggesteddonation.com/interspective/my-roommates-camera-is-a-racist/feed0A Reputation for Amorous Predispositionshttp://suggesteddonation.com/interspective/vermeer-gets-us-wet
http://suggesteddonation.com/interspective/vermeer-gets-us-wet#commentsSun, 13 Sep 2009 23:15:30 +0000http://suggesteddonation.com/?p=1562blockbuster museum exhibition. The Picasso and Braque show a few years back had us carrying around a stack of books for three months to hide the perpetual boner we'd get thinking about those lovely gray-brown forays into cubism. And don't even get us started about Leonardo's
Ginevra de' Benci at the National Gallery.
This week in At the Met, we look at Vermeer. More inside. ]]>Nothing gets us going like a blockbuster museum exhibition. The Picasso and Braque show a few years back had us carrying around a stack of books for three months to hide the perpetual boner we’d get thinking about those lovely gray-brown forays into cubism. And don’t even get us started about Leonardo’s Ginevra de’ Benci at the National Gallery.

So you can imagine our excitement when we learned that the good folks at the Rijksmuseum in Merry Old Amsterdam had lent the Met The Milkmaid (1658ish), Vermeer’s best known work with the possible exception of The Girl With the Pearl Earring (and that’s only because of ScarJo).

There are a total of 30 known Vermeers, and six of those are currently on view in a little warren of rooms tucked just off the Greek and Roman Galleries. The show is excellent and the Milkmaid is fucking ridiculously good, and appears to have been recently cleaned (look at this image search for the painting—half the returns are yellowed with muck and varnish that’s since been removed). The blue and gold of the maid’s dress are lush and vital. It’s a simple mimetic scene—a young woman pours milk near a window. But then you step right up to the thing and you see that the loaf of bread on the table is rendered as minuscule dots, which makes it glow and radiate. It’s an ethereal trick, but the painting is grounded by the nicks and divots on the wall behind the maid. The whitewash is almost translucent, the blueblack of masonry or underpainting just barely shows through. And the . . . the fucking quality of light and shadow is fantastic, so vivid that you can tell it’s overcast outside, even though you can only see a fraction of a windowpane at an angle.

The show’s well curated, too—also on view are period Delft tiles, nearly identical to the ones seen in the painting, and a tightly edited group of works by Vermeer’s contemporaries. Among our favorites were a pair of canvasses by Van Vilets and De Witte. Each painter shows an the interior of Amsterdam’s Oude Kerk (old church). By 1600, wall text informs, the Netherlands had gone almost totally Protestant, and they converted their Gothic (Catholic) churches into more Romanesque (Protestant) buildings by stripping the “‘popish’ appointments and whitewashing their columns and walls.” Anyway, the paintings show the Oude Kerk as a weird, wonderful palimpsest—the vaulted arches and stone tracery show the church’s gothic pedigree. It’s in the building’s bones, and no whitewash can cover it.

In de Witte’s view, a dog, visually emphasized by a square of daylight, lifts its leg to piss on one of the church’s columns.

Highlight: The textures in Young Woman with a Water Pitcher (1662ish). You can see the “needlework” on the tablecloth and the creases in the woman’s headdress. Remarkable.

Memorable quote: “For at least two centuries before Vermeer’s time, milkmaids and kitchen maids had (or were assigned) a reputation for amorous predispositions.”

Next week: African art, for real this time. We were distracted by Vermeer.

]]>http://suggesteddonation.com/interspective/vermeer-gets-us-wet/feed0Jerk University: The Nicholas Roerich Museumhttp://suggesteddonation.com/lets-get-critical/the-very-talented-too-talented
http://suggesteddonation.com/lets-get-critical/the-very-talented-too-talented#commentsSun, 23 Aug 2009 20:05:02 +0000http://suggesteddonation.com/?p=1279
If you want to engineer buildings or paint or sculpt, fine. But doing all three is just tacky. It says, "I think I'm better than you because I made the statue of David and designed St. Peter's Basilica and you spent 45 minutes yesterday trying to figure out how to play 'Smooth Criminal' on the guitar." Well, I'm unimpressed by a broad ouvre. As the saying goes, "It doesn’t matter many extracurricular activities you have on your application to Jerk University. It’s still Jerk University, and it’s still a shitty school."
There's lots more inside, where we visit the Nicholas Roerich Museum and get in touch with our deep-seeded hatred of polymaths.]]>Say, do you know which group of people is terrible? It’s polymaths. They’re a bunch of assholes. These overachieving Renaissance men and women make the rest of us look like sub-human layabouts by comparison.

Oh, what’s that, Ghost of Michelangelo? You weren’t content to sculpt a top-notch marble relief at age 16? You had to design the Laurentian Library, where Vasari said, “boldness and grace are equally conspicuous”? And then you spent the next half-century creating the most iconic sculpture and fresco in the Western canon? That’s great, except it makes you an insufferable braggart.

If you want to engineer buildings or paint or sculpt, fine. But doing all three is just tacky. It says, “I think I’m better than you because I made the statue of David and designed St. Peter’s Basilica and you spent 45 minutes yesterday trying to figure out how to play ‘Smooth Criminal’ on the guitar.”

Well, I’m unimpressed by a broad ouvre. As the saying goes, “It doesn’t matter how many extracurricular activities you have on your application to Jerk University. It’s still Jerk University, and it’s still a shitty school.”

The Russian artist Nicholas Roerich (1874-1947) was a notable alum of JU. While wandering through Manhattan’s Roerich Museum recently, I asked a docent what was up with all the religious paintings—was the guy a mystic? The docent half-smiled and shook his head. “No, he was a scientist.”

A note to aspiring artist-scientists: no one likes a showoff. If you try to wear too many hats, your work will suffer and you’ll look like a fool because you’ll be wearing several hats. Besides, people will get jealous of your versatility and they’ll spread rumors about you being a Scientologist, so it’s best to focus on a single discipline and go with that. For instance, I sacrificed a promising career in the sciences (C+ in high school chemistry; physics in summer school) to focus on my Art. And the decision clearly paid dividends:

Roerich wasn’t content to be a mere scientist. Like Michelangelo and Dion Sanders, he was hell bent on making everyone else seem shiftless by producing a wide and profound body of work. Exhaustive research (the museum brochure and Wikipedia) reveals that Roerich studied at a fine arts academy while simultaneously pursuing a law degree. I mean Jesus Christ, come on. Nobody does that. He was also an accomplished archaeologist and a member of everything from the Mark Twain Society to the Red Cross to the French Ethnographical Society (which he founded). Oh, and Roerich did the set design for the infamous debut of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Late in his life he drafted a pact—ratified by FDR and 35 other heads of state—establishing the protection of cultural artifacts during times of war.

But the worst part? The worst part of all of this? Is that his art is killer. Dude published 32 books and he still found time to develop a great painterly technique and earn multiple Nobel nominations. That smug bastard.

The Roerich Museum’s 200 or so paintings are as gorgeous as they are soulful. Many show religious icons (Milarepa, “Mahomet”) that dominate the picture plane; in others, anonymous figures contrast with muscular landscapes and hallucinogenic skies. Nearly all of the canvases show Roerich to be a skilled draftsman with a powerful understanding of color and light. The Museum itself—an 1890s townhouse with stained glass windows and creaky stairs—is the perfect setting for his work.

So there you have it. Nicholas Roerich: archeologist, writer, philosopher, lawyer, anthropologist, and painter.

And first-rate dick.

]]>http://suggesteddonation.com/lets-get-critical/the-very-talented-too-talented/feed0sorry for the troubles, we will be backhttp://suggesteddonation.com/interspective/sorry-for-the-troubles-we-will-be-back
http://suggesteddonation.com/interspective/sorry-for-the-troubles-we-will-be-back#commentsMon, 25 May 2009 18:04:14 +0000http://suggesteddonation.com/?p=1228this memorial day, remember that we’ll be blogging again soon, we promise!…]]>this memorial day, remember that we’ll be blogging again soon, we promise!
]]>http://suggesteddonation.com/interspective/sorry-for-the-troubles-we-will-be-back/feed0READ THE SUNhttp://suggesteddonation.com/lets-get-critical/read-the-sun
http://suggesteddonation.com/lets-get-critical/read-the-sun#commentsMon, 04 May 2009 17:09:48 +0000http://www.suggesteddonation.com/?p=1157The Rockefeller Hall has a great collection of large-format Art Nouveau advertising posters. As usual, images and a rant after the jump.]]>Unlike everybody else, we dislike advertisements. We know. Weâ€™re taking a controversial position, but bear with us here.

We kind of think that economics is about as much of a science as witch doctoring. The world economy is short-circuiting right now because everyone went along with the sage advice of the financial gurus who thought up mortgage-backed securities and cutting bad debt up into traunches that could be sold as good debt . . . and on and on.
As we understand it (full disclosure: we donâ€™t understand it) one of the cornerstones of capitalism is that people act rationally and in their own self-interest, and even if capitalism stratifies the classes and ruins the earth with a consumptive ethos, we can at least reap the rewards of the generative engine of the free market. Innovation and production of wealth, blah blah blah. OK, fine, donâ€™t love it, but at the moment, weâ€™re too much of a wimp to rage against this machine.

But hereâ€™s the problem. Advertisements. FUCKING LIE. THEY LIESO HARD. So how are the discrete constituents (consumers) of a capitalist system supposed to make these rational decisions in their own self-interest if theyâ€™re bombarded with disingenuous images so often repeated that even the savviest of media consumers arenâ€™t immune to their charms? And donâ€™t give us that dreck arguing against Galbraithâ€™s dependence effect, like this professor CSPU does: â€œneeds, wants, tastes, and demand all originate within the consumer. A sign that says “Lemonadeâ€”5Â¢” cannot create a desire for the product if the consumer is not thirsty or does not like lemonade.â€

Weâ€™re not sure if this guyâ€™s a moron or a liar but this is the Internet so weâ€™re prepared to call him both. An ad can do exactly that fucking thing. It can create want. Absolutely it can. Are you telling us that fashion fetishists really just â€˜needâ€™ new clothes? No, they want the clothes that an adjacency in Vanity Fair has advertised. Are you seriously saying that Hammacker Schemmlerâ€™sproducts exist to fulfill needs that people already have prior to reading their catalogue on an airplane?

What weâ€™re trying to argue here is that we really hate how the axiom of capitalism is that people act rationally, but then the organizations trying to sell us product donâ€™t permit us to act rationally. They force us to act emotionally, out of lust or fear or greed. Even the way that TV ads are produced is designed to evoke emotional (as opposed to rational) responseâ€”audio in commercials is compressed in such a way that ads sound louder than TV programs. Itâ€™s harder to act â€œrationallyâ€ when youâ€™re being sonically bombarded.
We know, we know, this argument is tired and itâ€™s been argued more coherently with more intellectual rigor by everyone from Naomi Klein to Adbusters, but all weâ€™re trying to say is that misleading advertisementsâ€”and thatâ€™s almost all of themâ€”arenâ€™t fair, and they undermine a tenet of the system theyâ€™re nominally trying to prop up. Itâ€™s weird and despicable, like a skinhead on a unicycle. What.

What we hate a lot less are ads that just level with you, and thereâ€™s a goodâ€™un by Louis Rhead in the Metâ€™s Rockefeller Hall (remember? This blog concerns museums!) It says, in its entirety, â€œREAD THE SUN.â€ Thatâ€™s it. Just a straightforward command: no emotional manipulation, no lies-by-omission, no disingenuous viral marketing, no false dichotomies, no lazily pregnant double-entendre. With this ad, we know where we stand, and we’re able to decide whether or not to comply with the all-caps instruction.

Not much more to say on these guys. As Penfield wrote, â€œA design that needs study is not a poster no matter how well it is executed.â€
Sidenote: itâ€™s the mark of a phenomenal collection when the hallways taking you from one gallery to the next are themselves packed with terrific art. A recent AP article on museum attendance spiking in this down economy states that, â€œAt any given time, most museums display only 1 percent of [their] collections.â€ Letâ€™s ramp that up, shall we? Per Andyâ€™s bathroom post, we advocate for putting some of the works currently in storage in the Metâ€™s bowels and annexes on the walls of the restroom.

The Rockefeller Hall

Highlights: All of them. Large-format Art Nouveau lithographs.

Memorable Quote: “READ THE SUN”

Next week: Self-Portraits in the Modern Mezzanine

]]>http://suggesteddonation.com/lets-get-critical/read-the-sun/feed0‘Pressionshttp://suggesteddonation.com/lets-get-critical/pressionism-i
http://suggesteddonation.com/lets-get-critical/pressionism-i#commentsTue, 21 Apr 2009 18:19:32 +0000http://www.suggesteddonation.com/?p=1060What we do know is that these paintings are pretty as all get-out and seriously, you should be going to this museum all the fucking time. Someday youâ€™ll have kids and youâ€™ll move to Connecticut and it will be boring as shit and youâ€™ll miss the days when one of the worldâ€™s great repositories of cultural history was just a subway ride away, but you blew your chance to be a regular there because you got high or spent time with your girlfriend when youâ€™re missing the goddamn point because you donâ€™t seem to realize that you would enjoy being high in the Jaques and Natasha Gelman Collection, or that you could french your sweetheart upstairs while looking at the fucking Rodins which are the most erotic objects in the universe, Legends of the Fall-era Brad Pitt included. Come on in to get yelled at while learning about painting!]]>Oh, Impressionism. Youâ€™re the least offensive of art movements to our modern eye, with your treatment of light and refusal to delve into the tortured interior life of humanity. Who knew that, at your inception, you were considered shocking and radical? We did, thanks to taking Intro to Art History.

Impressionism was distinct from earlier Euro painting styles in its focus on momentsâ€”how the light hits the facade of a church at a certain hourâ€”but not moments of historical import. Impressionists traded in genre pictures (a term first defined as a negativeâ€”not a still life and not a history painting [NSFW if you W for Puritans]. Anyway, genre painting portrays everyday life–people walking around a city, sitting on a bench, or working in a field).

An Impressionist canvas might show light glancing off water, or smoke rising from a chimney, with just ">a few broad brushstrokes, but the viewer connects with it more intimately than he would with photorealistic representation. Maybe itâ€™s something about omitting details so the audience has to unconsciously participate, supplying their own memories to fill in the broad patches of color.

Who the fuck knows? Not us. What we do know is that these paintings are pretty as all get-out and seriously, you should be going to this museum all the fucking time. Someday youâ€™ll have kids and youâ€™ll move to Connecticut and it will be boring as shit and youâ€™ll miss the days when one of the worldâ€™s great repositories of cultural history was just a subway ride away, but you blew your chance to be a regular there because you got high or spent time with your girlfriend when youâ€™re missing the goddamn point because you donâ€™t seem to realize that you would enjoy being high in the Jaques and Natasha Gelman Collection, or that you could french your sweetheart upstairs while looking at the fucking Rodins which are the mosteroticobjects in the universe, Legends of the Fall-era Brad Pitt included.

You fucking asshole.

So anyway, in Impressionism, a premium was put on depicting light. Although paint was often applied impastoâ€”thicklyâ€”and the style appears sketchy and imprecise, Impressionists slaved over their compositions as much as their pre-Raphaelite forbearers. A bit of wall text in one of the rooms in the Annenberg Galleries notes, â€œDespite the seemingly rapid brushwork and the summary treatment of detail, [Manetâ€™s portrait of his wife] was preceded by at least two drawings and an oil sketch.â€ Which is of course great, because it takes so much mastery and practice to achieve this effortless, spontaneous effect.

Art. Is the best. Except for Damien Hirst.

PS A moment of silence for Leonore Annenberg, who sponsored 9 rooms of European 19th century painting (one of which we were nominally reviewing here) and who, despite serving in the Reagan administration, donated a shitload of art and money to the Met. The Annenberg Foundation has also given away some $3 billion dollars to institutions like PBS and NPR, which makes her A-OK in our book, Gipper or no.

The Annenberg Galleries (1 of 9)

Highlights: Beardy McBarbarossa (below) (not his real name). He looks kind of sad, but still like he wants to be friends with me.

I accept.

Memorable Quote: â€œMonetâ€™s art depends on observation of his environment, and to that extent, it is always autobiographical. In his pictures, one can chart the seasons, the weather, or as here, the look of womenâ€™s fashion in 1873.â€ From the wall text for Camille Monet on a Garden Bench, 1873

Next week: Self-portraits in the Modern mezzanine.

]]>http://suggesteddonation.com/lets-get-critical/pressionism-i/feed0Medieval Treasuryhttp://suggesteddonation.com/interspective/only-360-shopping-days-until-good-friday
http://suggesteddonation.com/interspective/only-360-shopping-days-until-good-friday#commentsTue, 14 Apr 2009 20:05:32 +0000http://www.suggesteddonation.com/?p=986
These scenes (and others, like the stations of the cross) are fascinating precisely because their content is so regimented. The Gospel says that Christ was nailed to a cross, so he has to have stigmata. He was stabbed with a lance, so he has to have a slit in his ribcage. His mother was there, so she has to be seen reacting to her dead son. Etcetera.
More inside.]]>In Medieval and Renaissance art, there are a few stock scenes after Christâ€™s death which are repeatedly, obsessively depicted. They are: deposition, where Jesusâ€™ body is brought down from the cross; pietÃ¡, where the Maries (Mother and Magdalene), apostles, and maybe an angel or two mourn for him; entombment, or burial; and finally assumption, where JC is resurrected and flies up to Heaven.

These scenes (and others, like the stations of the cross) are fascinating precisely because their content is so regimented. The Gospel says that Christ was nailed to a cross, so he has to have stigmata. He was stabbed with a lance, so he has to have a slit in his ribcage. His mother was there, so she has to be seen reacting to her dead son. Etcetera.

But since artists werenâ€™t free to deviate from scripture, weâ€™re fascinated by the differences between each rendition of these tropes. Itâ€™s sort of like our love affair with the 12-bar blues in E. We know that the song goes E-A E-A B-E, but weâ€™re interested in hearing how it goes. So, whatever, Robert Johnson throws his voice, and Muddy Waters lays on the double entendre: they’re both singing the 12-bar blues in E, but each iteration is singular and interesting on its own terms.

Likewise, a deposition painted in Flanders in the 15th century is totally different from one done in Florence in the 16th.Â The Northern Renaissance had an altogether darker outlook (think Brueghel and Bosch). The Christ being lowered from the cross in Dutch paintings tended to look more emaciated and injured than the Jesuses being deposed in the South, who appeared more saintly and placid).

This is all by way of saying the Medieval Treasury, just to the North of the big Medieval hall at the heart of the Met (you know, the one with the giant choir screen) has some great artifacts that were created within rigidly defined parameters. None of our camerafone pix do justice so, apologies. Youâ€™ll just have to go in person. Pobrecitos.

The gallery has very low lighting, which is appropriate given the content, and seems to have existed in more or less its current configuration for a while (there are several generations of wall text accompanying the statuaryâ€”typographophiles take note). We liked the colorfully illuminated Spanish copy of City of God, and the highly articulated micro-sculptures that fit into a walnut shell.

The French pietÃ¡ (ca. 1515) stopped us in our tracks. The scene is more or less life-sized, and the two figures bookending Mary and Christ are the donors who commissioned the piece (see this post for our reserved and profanity-free thoughts on money and art). Thereâ€™s all this stuff going on in the scene (killer drapery!), but the only thing that really matters is the grief in Maryâ€™s eyes. She looks like she’s about to vomit, which is about what you’d expect if you’d just seen your son tortured to death. I swear, no matter how many times I see sculptures like this, I still feel the urge to grab strangers in the gallery and shout, in my most professorial Art Historian voice, “These fucking things are made of STONE, isn’t that crazy? How does it look so much like people?”

The Medieval Treasury

Highlights: Bourbonnais PietÃ¡, a crazy statuette of Saint Anne Holding the Virgin Holding Christ (seriously, is St. Anne supposed to be huge or is the virgin supposed to be tiny?)
Memorable Quote: French, Berry, from the Tomb of John, Duke of Berry, Choir of Sainte-Chapelle, Bourges (until 1757).

Next Week: ‘Pressionism

A 15th century German pietÃ¡ in walnut.
]]>http://suggesteddonation.com/interspective/only-360-shopping-days-until-good-friday/feed0The Jan Mitchell Treasuryhttp://suggesteddonation.com/lets-get-critical/the-jan-mitchell-treasury
http://suggesteddonation.com/lets-get-critical/the-jan-mitchell-treasury#commentsThu, 02 Apr 2009 19:54:51 +0000http://www.suggesteddonation.com/?p=931 A South American Getaway in the Met! As always, there's more inside.
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Just as the Jan Mitchell Treasury attempts to cover the breadth of pre-Columbian South American art in a single moderately sized gallery, we intend to review the Mitchell Treasury in the scant few minutes we have before we leave for California (by way of Eero Saarinenâ€™s optimistic ode to Modernism, the freshly-restored TWA terminal at JFK! Cantilevered hyperboloids hell yes!)

The Mitchell Treasury is a winner. The wall text concisely explains the rise and fall of city-states, and many of the galleyâ€™s objects either A. Are made from Incan gold, or B. Depict skulls and bugs.

We have a confession to make. We visited the Mitchell treasury just after reading Andyâ€™s post, “talk to strangers.” And we meant to speak with the lady snapping pictures of the artifacts with her digital SLR, we really did. Our borrowed point-and-shoot was running out of batteries (weâ€™d taken too many shots of a fertility statue prominently featuring an erect penis). So we thought weâ€™d introduce ourselves as a writer for the world-famous Suggested Donation, give her our email address, and politely request JPEGs of a few of her pictures for inclusion in this column.

Well. We failed. As we approached her, we were overtaken by the memory of the first time weâ€™d ever asked a girl to slow dance in sixth grade. K— M——- (who we still have a crush on and would marry if the chance arose) rolled her eyes, sighed loudly and said, â€œfineâ€ in the same tone of voice usually reserved for words like â€œtreasonâ€ or â€œstaff infection.â€
So, no progress on that front. Sorry, Andy. But itâ€™s like we always say: â€œDuring the first half of the first millennium B.C., the ceramics of the southern Peruvian Coast were strongly influenced by those of Chavin, the expansionist religious cult of the central Peruvian highlands.â€